Attack of the killer fish

Snakehead: A fish out of water by Eric Jay Dolin, Smithsonian Institution Press, £18.95/$24.95, ISBN 1588341542 Reviewed by Adrian Barnett

"IN A pond where it didn't belong/ Lived a snakehead as big as King Kong./ It ate all the fishes and said 'How delicious'/ But now I'll be moseyin' along."

Accompanied by pictures of a huge fish terrorising a fisherman and then being attacked by jet planes, this limerick appeared in The Washington Post on 7 July 2002. Also the subject of cartoons and song, the snakehead, a voracious south-east Asian fish, is the eponymous anti-hero of Eric Jay Dolin's book Snakehead: A fish out of water.

Dolin tells the story of an alien invasion that terrified parts of the north-eastern US through the summer of 2002. Ugly, toothy and unfriendly, the northern snakehead's appearance in genteel Maryland had all the elements of a B-movie creature feature. Editors and cartoonists ...

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